Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Let’s begin with a quote from Oscar Wilde, whose birthday this is: “A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.”

The audience at this debate consists of undecided voters. If you saw the season premiere of The Walking Dead, undecided voters are like that but with slightly better hygiene.

Some nervous Jewish college student named Jeremy, who really looks like a Jeremy, asks if he’ll ever have a job. Mittens lies about Pell Grants, then says he knows what it takes to create jobs. Jeremy is thinking “a job, I only want one fucking job.” Obama says he wants to build industrial jobs. I don’t think nervous Jewish college boy was thinking of working on an assembly line, riveting bumpers on Buicks.

Obama is trying to look interested and attentive while Romney is speaking. Actually looks pained.

“What Gov. Romney said just isn’t true.” In debate prep, they had to hit him with electric jolts 23 times before they got him to say that.

Obama says we need to move to energy independence, an impossibility I thought only Republicans talked about. Drill, baby, drill!

Romney says Obama stopped oil drilling in North Dakota because of migratory birds. Dude just does not like birds, Big or otherwise. Says Obama “has not been Mr. Oil or Mr. Gas or Mr. Coal.” (Insert birth certificate joke here.) Says he’ll make North America energy independent in 8 years. Every Mexican and Canadian just shivered without quite knowing why. Mitt Romney just declared himself True Czar of All the Americas.

“very little of what Gov. Romney just said was true.”

Obama: “clean coal technology.” Sigh. Oh lord, he gets into a who-loves-coal-more contest with Romney: “I hear Governor Romney say he’s a big coal guy... when you were governor of Massachusetts, you stood in front of a coal plant and pointed at it and said, this plant kills, and took great pride in shutting it down. And now suddenly you’re a big champion of coal.” Romney has done, like, two or three decent things in his entire life, and Obama shits on one of them. Is Obama saying coal plants don’t kill?

Romney says something about a “bucket, if you will, of deductions.” Can I deduct my bucket?

Romney doing the smirk thing.

Obama nicely and more or less accurately describes how Romney’s plans will drive up the deficit, because the deficit is the only fucking thing that fucking matters. Says Mittens can’t name what deductions he’ll close. Not won’t, can’t. Says the only things Romney has said he will cut to make up for it all is PBS and Planned Parenthood. While he speaks, the Mittenssmirk reaches unprecedented levels of smugness.

Romney: “of course they [R’s numbers] add up.”

R: “This puts us on a road to Greece.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen one more than a few minutes of one of those Hope-Crosby movies.

Romney walks closer and closer to Candy as he refuses her entreaties to stop talking when his time runs out.

R on sex equality in the workplace: In Massachusetts “I brought us whole binders full of women.” That’s a Mormon thing, probably.

He adds that “I recognized that if you’re going to have women in the workforce...” If! “...that sometimes they need to be more flexible.” So they can do their domestic chores with no help from their husbands, like God intended.

Romney is repeating the word economy over and over until it loses all meaning.

Obama says he wants gender equality because he has two daughters, and all Romney has is stinky boys.

R. says he thinks every woman should have access to contraceptives and that employers shouldn’t have a veto on that. Oooo-kay.

R: “President Bush and I are different people.” Prove it.

By the way, New York Magazinesays George Bush now spends his time “painting, making portraits of dogs and arid Texas landscapes.” Finger-painting with his own feces, one imagines.

Obama says Romney looooves China, he wants to marry China, he’s investing in companies selling surveillance equipment to China. “You’re the last person who’s going to get tough on China.”

O says R much worse than Bush, he’s “gone to a more extreme place when it comes to social policy”.

Wait, bald black guy who says he voted for Obama in 2008 asks why he deserves his vote in 2012. That’s it? Of all the questions from all the audience members, that vague nothingburger made the cut?

R supports immigration because his father was born in Mexico and came here. His father was an American citizen, it’s not the same fucking thing.

Romney says Obama has money in the Caymans too. Candy wonders out loud what this has to do with immigration.

Candy just told Mitt to sit down.

Obama (re Benghazi): “While we were still dealing with our diplomats being threatened, Governor Romney put out a press release trying to make political points. And that’s not how a commander in chief operates. You don’t turn national security into a political issue”. Obama hasn’t really been paying attention for a very long time now, has he?

The problem here is that he was asked about what he did about embassy security before the attacks, not what he’ll do now (which, in case you were wondering, is find out who was responsible and make sure it never happens again).

“Apology tour”! Drink!

IT WAS ON THE TIP OF HIS TONGUE: “because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.”

Asked about gun violence, Romney says that automatic weapons are already illegal in the US (they’re not), then blames gun violence on single-parent families. “But gosh, to tell our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married to someone...” Unless it’s someone of the same sex, obvs. “...So we can make changes in the way our culture works to help bring people away from violence and give them opportunity and bring them in the American system.” Oh, I think violence pretty much is the American system.

If I understand that correctly, Romney will hand out a free AK-47 with every marriage license.

But “the greatest failure we’ve had with regards to gun violence, in some respects, is what is known as Fast and Furious”. Unless you count the weekly massacres this summer, every one of which, I believe, was carried out with legally purchased firearms.

O: “I think Governor Romney was for an assault weapons ban before he was against it.”

R starts repeating “government does not create jobs,” which is odd because he keeps promising to create 12 million of them.